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When Petunia Dursley found a baby on her doorstep, she cursed the idiot teenager who decided that her mistake should be left on Petunia’s stoop of all places. What were children up to these days? In her day, people had the common decency to leave unwanted brats at the hospital. But then she realized the child was a little bit too old to be a recently born unwanted child, and she saw the piece of paper sticking out of the bassinet. It was a cold morning, and she had not slept well, waking up even before the milkman arrived.
So, she took out the paper, read it, crumbled it, cried into it, stomped on it, and then tore the remnants to shreds.
Now, Petunia Dursley lived in the same house her parents had, the house of her childhood, which her parents had gifted to her when she wed Vernon and changed the name on the mailbox from Evans to Dursley. She knew everyone and everything in the surrounding area, and if she didn’t - she would shortly. Which is why Petunia grabbed a piece of paper and a pen, put the new note in the bassinet, got dressed, and marched her way down two streets to the only house in the neighborhood with people who were absolutely not normal, and passed the child on.
So, when a coughing Eileen Snape opened her door, staying with her son for some time for safety as she was (after all, she may be a pureblood witch of the Prince family, but she had married a muggle and it was only her son’s protection that could reliably keep a sick old woman safe in these times), and found the child, she most definitely saw the note.
“Lily is dead, here’s her son. I know your he’s your kind. She named him Harry. I will not be raising him. - Petunia” Now, Eileen’s eyesight was not the best, so she didn’t read the word kind as the insult it was intended. No, she saw the world kid, right before her hand smudged the poorly dried cheap ink. Petunia could not use one of Vernon’s good pens for this brat, after all!
So, Eileen Snape brought the baby into her home, and when her son came back, appearing perfectly destroyed from the inside out, and was told by his mother that Lily’s son was in his house, and that Petunia claimed the boy was his son, well, Severus Snape was not coherent enough to question the impossibility of the fact. Later, he latched onto both the delusional hope that Lily had worked some magic (the deepest darkest corner of his mind whispered that maybe James Potter had taken polyjuice), and the spite that the child’s hair was a touch too black to be James Potter’s very dark brown but not quite black shade (forgetting any sort of genetics and not knowing James Potter’s family tree), so Harry grew up raised by a father who loved his mother and saw him as the last embodiment of her, a doting grandmother who swore she would live to see his graduate Hogwarts, and for all he knew - it was a lie to the rest of the world that his dad was not his dad, a lie concocted by his brilliant mother to keep him and his dad safe. So for the rest of the world, the boy was Harry Potter. But inside, he was the son of brilliant potions researcher Severus Snape, who ignored annual calls from Albus Dumbledore to teach at Hogwarts, and through his mother’s wit and magic not only was he his father’s heir, he was also the heir to the Potter line and all that it entailed.
And so Harry Potter grew up loved and wanted (and in the end, who knew about the wards? What was stronger, Severus Snape’s carefully studied magic or whatever the blood wards protected him from? And what radius applied to the blood protections, if he had a home two streets over from his cousin, who his aunt reluctantly let him see twice a year on their respective birthdays as long as everyone acted normal, would the loophole fulfill the criteria? Who knows?)
And so the story unfolds.